EII – Dead on Arrival

The computer industry loves its buzzwords, and one that has cropped up in recent years is enterprise information integration. The idea is that everyone knows that companies have their data locked up in multiple, incompatible IT systems: ERP, CRM, supply chain, etc. At present, the only way to make sense of it is to extract data from these systems, try and resolve inconsistencies and data quality issues, and then load the result into a data warehouse from which you can report on the data in a common form.